Unions are bad because they are coercive with State coercive monopoly power. Probably the first unions were good, but today they are a State monopoly. They don't help the people that need it most, but use bully power to keep those in there in their jobs (too chicken or stupid to do it alone), so they need groupthink power little petty tyrant Hitlers running around. You can see bully all over their eyes too. The post office if the same way - monopoly power. Just a bunch of bullies, but scared to they need a mafia union goon squad, like high school clique to protect them. Let the free market rule and see us fly, instead of relying on groups for protection from other groups, this all leads to more violence.

Leave aside the fact without unions, we'd be better off than medieval serfs in the material sense--you'd be working a 6-day, 80-hour week or thereabouts. Let's look at whose the real bully, shall we?

Once again, without unions, it's hello medieval serfdom. If you don't belong to a union, you don't have the right to say "bo!" on the job. You can be fired at will for no reason--which means you really have no rights at all. (The only reason you can't be fired are because of race, gender, handicap or age--all thanks to laws that labor unions helped pass.) You have no right to free speech or free association on the job. Your workplace, desk or whatever can be searched at will. You don't even have the right to make enough to live on. In other words, inside the workplace, the boss is pretty much a little tyrant who can do just about anything, and you have virtually nothing you can do about it. And, of course, while the so-called union bullies that Ellen complains about are *elected* representatives, your boss is someone you have no control over. He might as well be king.

Finally, I should mention that unions not only get higher wages for their members, they also raise the general wage rate for the entire community. Even at the statewide level, higher unionization rates correlate with higher wage rates. Places with low rates of unionization are generally fearful and backwards--like the Deep South. That's a great model of progress & freedom, Ellen!

Mr Rosenburg has some very relevent points to share. It's certainly true that every miniscule 'right' that we are allowed at the workplace was hard won, mostly by union efforts and sometimes paid for with blood.

Many of the ranks of the FBI were found from union buster thugs in the early days by the way. Just thought I'ld throw that one into the mix for the heck of it.

It is important to remember what happened in Paris in the sixties. You know, the second Paris commune and first Situationist International. Also in anarchist Spain of the 1930s. In both of those momentous events, THE PEOPLE THEMSELVES THROUGH DIRECT ACTION simply occupied their workplaces and thew the fuckhole feudalists out! Through a complex set of circumstances, in Spain, the union was the workers themselves with no hierarchies and it worked beautifully; The people at work controled the means of production for the good of all. They produced and gave of their labors freely and it worked beautifully!! Everybody that wanted employment had it, everyone had shelter, bread and wine even if they didnt work and resources were managed with great effeciency when competition was taken out of the picture.

In Paris in '68, for a whole month, the students and workers told the world that their barbaric feudalism was at an end and lived and moved and had their being in autonomous zones free of bosses, cops, or corporate control.

The point of sharing all this is how it all came crashing down. In both Spain and Paris, communists disrupted the people's autonomy diliberately because their independence and complete rejection of capital and beauracratic control of resources meant the communists too lose their grip around the workers'throats. In Paris, the unions and communists convinced the people to go back to their jobs with marginal pay raises and acted like the worker 'won'. The people, by divesting the power in themselves and co-opting it, giving it willingly away to a group of individuals that propagandized that they were acting in the defense of the worker, had lost their freedom and returned back to wage slavery and capitalist hegemony at the price of a mere pittance. In both places, if the people were UNITED (Union of Direct Action, Boston Tea Party, etc) they might have smashed the whole system worldwide.

But historically, if you want to know about a union that terrified the authorities and truely threatened capitalist hegemony, it was the IWW. I admit I dont know much about their current status but in the early part of the century, they were a union that refused to speak to the bosses and only spoke to and organized for the workers'interests. They were huge and non sectarian and operated under the banner of an injury to one is an injury to all. They organized massive wild cat strikes and against consription and the authorities smashed and jailed them all and they never quite recovered after that. They were however the least corrupt and most effective union of their time. Their idea of one big union is a good one; in theory a garment worker gets mistreated, and there is a huge hostile crowd of garment workers, auto workers, garbagemen, electricians, etc, etc, outside shutting the place down and refusing to talk to the bosses or the cops! Now that's a union!!



http://www.iww.org

I think the preample to their constitution is wonderful

http://bari.iww.org/homesites/English.html

Local LA branch:

http://www.iwwla.org/

The unions (in the US at least) function to provide capitalism with labor peace and the workers with better wages and stability.Is this a good/fair deal? It certainly has nothing to do with revolutionary change and a movement for socialism that's for sure.

What we need is a movement to take back the unions from the bottom up.